The Atlantic Daily: FIFA Draws a Red Card

What's Happening: FIFA Draws a Red Card

On Wednesday, the Justice Department confirmed what many suspected all along: FIFA may be rampant with corruption. Following an FBI investigation, 14 FIFA officials and corporate executives were charged on 47 corruption charges.

Snapshot

Quoted

Adrienne LaFrance: “It almost looks like a wounded animal. There’s that little hop in its gait, the way it looks tentative as it springs forward from its haunches, the not-exactly-straight trajectory of its path. Except this isn’t an injured animal. It is a robot.”

Joe Pinsker: “How is it that some people remain calm as unread messages trickle into their inboxes and then roost there unattended, while others can’t sit still knowing that there are bolded-black emails and red-dotted Slack messages?”

David A. Graham: “As anyone who’s ever watched a mob movie knows, even the best-laid schemes eventually hit rocky ground. For FIFA and its boss, Sepp Blatter, that moment came early Wednesday morning in Zurich, where seven top officials were arrested at a five-star hotel with views of Lake Zurich and the Alps.”

Evening Read

Alia Wong on the federal government’s plan to turn a former leprosy colony in Hawaii into a tourist trap.

Kalaupapa remains eerily sheltered from the rest of the world even today. A common subject of small talk in the village is the one day each year that a barge lands with supplies, including gas and food, when the water is calm enough for it to dock. But Kalaupapa is as breathtaking as it is haunting, marked by white-sand beaches, coral reefs, and tiny bungalows that look as if they’re frozen in time. It is, in some ways, a version of the Hawaii that was—pre-Waikiki, pre-World War II, pre-Five-0.